The 19th-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli once said there were three kinds of untruths: lies, damned lies and statistics.

To help restore their credibility, statisticians at more than 700 organisations in about 100 countries will stage events during this International Year of Statistics to celebrate the contribution that the mathematical science – love it or loathe it – has made to society at large.

Among other things, statistics have played a crucial role in understanding – and sometimes misunderstanding – the atmospheric build-up of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which is stoking climate change.

An artist's impressions of the Square Kilometre Array.

According to the climate statisticians, average global temperatures could rise by at least 3 degrees between now and the middle of the century, with temperatures at night likely to increase by double that amount.

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Again, it is statistics that help climatologists estimate the likelihood of extreme weather events, such as the floods and bushfires that recently ravaged parts of Australia. Similarly, models that suggest west Antarctica's ice sheets are warming faster than expected, and that Arctic sea ice is shrinking to a record low, rely in large part on the arcane art of statistics.

Irrespective of how accurate these predictions turn out to be, during the course of 2013, scientists will be making concerted efforts to combat at least some of the effects of global warming.

The base of Mars's Mount Sharp - the rover's destination. Photo: NASA

In addition to contemplating the construction of giant, earth-orbiting mirrors that would deflect some of the sun's rays, scientists are turning to the oceans in their quest to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

At least two promising approaches encourage the growth of marine algae, which have voracious appetites for carbon dioxide. One entails adding iron to the oceans; the other involves installing long tubes beneath the waves to draw up nutrient-rich waters in which algae thrive.

This year's weekly Science Matters column will not be confined to reporting on statistical and environmental research. In addition to reviewing developments in disciplines as diverse as organic chemistry, botany, zoology and palaeontology, we shall investigate several other promising areas of science.

Antarctica.

These include advances in satellite technologies, the hunt for life on Mars, the search for gravitational waves and the make-up of the universe and efforts to mimic the human brain in new computer systems.

Clearing the trash

The business of getting into space – and staying there in one piece – is becoming more hazardous. This is because of the rising risk of colliding with bits of orbiting space junk – from fragments of failed spacecraft, redundant satellites, spent booster rockets and a host of smaller odds and ends.

Unless the world's space agencies – which between them launch about 120 spacecraft every year – find ways to stop the pollution, and perhaps start a clean-up, manned missions to the moon and Mars, and the robotic exploration of outer space, may be in jeopardy.

To help tackle the problem, a Sydney-based space technology company, Saber Astronautics, has built a special instrument to prevent space junk from building up. Called DragEN, it will be deployed by the Manipal Institute of Technology in India. The instrument, known as a tether deployer, will be incorporated as a payload in the institute's latest research satellite.

At the end of its year-long mission, the yo-yo-shaped DragEN will deploy, unrolling 200 metres of special conductive string that interacts with the Earth's magnetic field. This will gently pull the spacecraft back to Earth, clearing the area for new satellites.

"India is one of the world's top space producers," says Saber Astronautics director Jason Held. "Australia has potential as a space exporter and it augurs well for further international collaboration."

The Australian government, through the Australian-India Council, recently awarded the company a grant to foster new relationships between Australian and Indian academics and students interested in space, Dr Held explains.

Watch this "junk-free" space.

Searching for ripples

Next month will be big for cosmology. Astrophysicists analysing screeds of hard-won data from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite will release maps of the cosmos.

These should reveal, as never before, how much dark matter, dark energy and ordinary matter the universe contains. If all goes to plan, the sophisticated satellite might also produce evidence of gravitational waves, which are basically ripples in the fabric of space-time. Stay tuned.

Surveying the skies

The famous Hubble Space Telescope last year discovered the most distant object known, a staggering 13.4 billion light years away.

"The object is so distant that its light we receive today was emitted when the universe was only 400 million years old," explains Curtin University astrophysicist Rob Soria.

During 2013, the world's biggest radio telescope, the $2 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will continue to gear up. "This year some of the SKA Pathfinders – small-scale models and test facilities for the full radio telescope – will be switched on for scientific observations," Dr Soria says.

Key advantages of the huge instrument – a joint venture between Australia and South Africa – include its radio-quietness, underpinned by a very low population density, and the telescope's 5000-kilometre maximum baseline, with broadband connections across Australia and beyond.

On red alert

Using its high-tech instruments, NASA's Curiosity rover last year succeeded in analysing the Red Planet's soil and found it contains a complex chemistry – including a sprinkling of carbon-containing compounds that might be ingredients for life.

Curiosity's mission goal for 2013 is to reach Mount Sharp, a five-and-a-half-kilometre-high mountain about 10 kilometres away. "It boasts geologies billions of years old, including a welter of clays and sulphates that might once have been associated with water," says Guy Murphy, a director of the Mars Society in Australia.

On the way there, the intrepid rover will perform routine checks, such as the calibration and testing of its bank of instruments.

Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed, is a hotbed of scientific interest. The crater hosts different geological and mineralogical features that provide evidence that liquid water once flowed there. The crater has exposed sedimentation layers revealing its geological history, making it the ideal location for searching.

Whence modern humans

Primates, most of which are quadrupeds, sport five digits on each hand and foot. Most also have one large finger and toe that is set against, or opposed to, the others, a feature that enables primates to grasp objects securely.

It's widely believed that humans branched from the evolutionary line of chimpanzees about 6 million to 8 million years ago.

When necessary, chimps, which are adept at climbing and use their long arms to swing from branch to branch or scale trees, can stand upright and waddle about on their hind legs. Yet they cannot extend knee-joints to straighten their legs when standing, a convenient manoeuvre that makes standing easier.

The skeletal remains of an ancient Ethiopian species, called Ardipith-ecus ramidus, which lived about 4.4 million years ago, is widely believed to be among the earliest progeny of modern humans. Yet it is unclear whether Ardi-pithecus is a direct ancestor of humans.

Despite the world's store of fossils showing tentative signs of running out, new research this year might well shed light on this most enigmatic of questions.

To the next level

It sounds a touch like science fiction, but a new kind of machine intelligence, or artificial intelligence (AI), may be in the making.

Computer scientists, in an attempt to reproduce aspects of the biological brain's hardware, are working on computer chips that simulate some of the ways in which neurons work.

As resultant computers get faster and more powerful, chances are it will not be long before they start resembling machines that "think".

New designs and computer architectures require the development of super-software systems. As well as neural networks, which approximate the way the human brain works, and genetic algorithms, which mimic the process of evolution in the natural world, the software might include as-yet-uninvented methods. Some of these might enable hitherto inanimate robots to become life-like, as it were.

The hunt is now on worldwide for trailblazing innovations in AI. Computer scientists are working on new programming paradigms and languages that have much in common with self-evolving biological systems.

The phenomenal speed and proficiency with which the futuristic systems might react to verbal and non-verbal communication and perform tasks – many of them simultaneously – is likely to give rise to a new breed of machine intelligence. Some say this might lie on the threshold of what may be regarded loosely as a form of consciousness. Now there's a thought.